Several years ago, two criminologists, James Q, Wilson and George Kelling developed their “broken windows” theory of crime. A neighborhood where broken windows in buildings are not repaired sends a signal that no one is in charge here, that breaking more windows cost nothing, that it has no undesirable consequences. The broken window is their metaphor for a whole host of ways that behavioral norms can break down in a community.

The truth of the broken windows theory has been well proven, in New York under Police Chief Bratton and Mayor Giuliani the police focused on enforcing laws against relatively minor offenses – graffiti, public drinking, panhandling, littering, and what was discovered is that when order is restored, a signal is sent out. This is a community where behavior has consequences.

As in most truths, the opposite is also true. In places of deepest suffering and great darkness where evil lives and breathes openly, a lighted lamp of goodness and hope will attract other lighted lamps of goodness and hope will be lit and human lives will change in response to the lighted lamp, for it says by its flame, there is light here, light is welcome here and hope rewarded.

When someone living in darkness is redeemed and brought back into the light through the grace of God, those living in the darkest places imaginable, even in a stone and steel cell in a maximum security prison, or in a mud-strewn, rain-soaked homeless camp in the thorny bushes along the road, or in a shimmering chrome pit of wealth and decadence; when the lamp of their redemption is lit, goodness will occur as their light shines forth.

When a lamp is lit by that person, through their redemption and through their work to bring the light blessing them to others, then in that dark place a hundred lamps come into light and darkness reigns no longer as hearts are awakened and spirits strengthened.

A criminal is best helped by a friend. The deep knowledge leader is from the community of the criminal. He has come from the darkness, following the light from the lamp of his being and brings the solution of good from within the problem of evil.

Helping the criminal brings us into work of great peril, moment and consequence, where the best guide is one having already trod the path, lighting the way.

The light from the lamp is a light of social justice, an active state of human consciousness, based on our divine patrimony, in which respect for each person’s human dignity governs all our social action, where each individual’s rights existed prior to society and must be recognized by it, and where each of us are called by God and our Church to defend the dignity of human beings, in every moment of our lives, and at every moment in history.

“Mankind’s moral sense is not a strong beacon light, radiating outward to illuminate in sharp outline all that it touches. It is, rather, a small candle flame, casting vague and multiple shadows, flickering and sputtering in the strong winds of power and passion, greed and ideology. But brought close to the heart and cupped in one’s hands, it dispels the darkness and warms the soul.” (James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense, p. 251)

“If Christ could befriend a former prostitute to the point of immortalizing her and appearing to her in his risen form before showing himself to any of his apostles, then the quality of divine mercy that led Our Lord to open paradise to the good thief is well in sight. ” F. Marks, John the Clarifier, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, July 2007, p. 15)

A professional criminal who transforms his life and seeks to help others is a lighted lamp capable of great work within the field of criminal reformation.

The professional criminal is a person who commits crimes for money, to whom crime is a way of life, habitual, as in—“of the nature of a habit; fixed by habit; constantly repeated or continued; customary” (Oxford Dictionary)—and prison time an occupational hazard.

A criminal, as we use the term, is a professional criminal.

The term criminal is used by Lampstand rather than other terms used such as: offender/ex-offender, convict/ex-convict, or felon/ex-felon because none of those specifically define the act of crime which is committed for economic reasons, while excluding those offenses of lust and perversion, addiction, momentary rage, mental illness, or accident.

The use of this term creates a clear line of demarcation between the individuals to whom our work is directed, and from who we look for innovative and effective solutions to solve the social problem of criminal reentry into the community.

We consider time served in maximum security prison as a qualifying factor in identifying criminal world leaders from the same perspective national business leaders would be identified by their involvement in nationally important business organizations.

Transformation and reformation are the primary terms used rather than the more commonly used term—rehabilitation—because the term rehabilitation implies a previous state of being when one was not a criminal and with most of the criminals Lampstand works with, they were essentially born into the criminal world, so the previous state of non-criminal-hood hasn’t really existed.

Professional criminals become part of the communal community when they make the choice to transform themselves, to create from within a different person than what they were previously, to become a person whose motivation is based on an eternal truth potent enough to overturn the truth of the criminal world and this eternal truth is only found in the Catholic Church.

Those penitential criminals who have found this truth, and also taken the steps necessary to become community leaders in the reformation of other criminals—becoming lighted lamps—are those to whom our work is directed.

For a transformed criminal to retain his balance within the world he must daily practice those ancient rituals dedicated workers of the apostolate have relied on for centuries to strengthen themselves, he must walk the eternal path seeking the deepest knowledge of all.

It is the knowledge gained from continuous communion with God; the continual prayer and daily practice set forth by the reach for perfection to which each Catholic is called through baptism and communion within the Kingdom of God.

In olden times, the paths humans made to travel here and there were made by human feet, traveling the same way through the forest and over the plain as the day and year before, and as the years deepened the path, it became a hardened way that remained for guidance through the woods and mountains to the way home.

As it is with our own path, made daily through the rituals established by the Church to feed her saints and priests the food divine—morning prayer, communion, midday angelus, praying the rosary, evening prayer, examination of conscience, sacrifices to the Church, to God, to Peter, fighting against sin and building virtue; and through this daily practice, the armor of God is slowly crafted as the penitential, transformed criminal aspiring to community leadership—for whom this is a vital journey of lifetime atonement from the years of harm caused to others through his criminality—enters into the hardened path of the priestly soul and saintly temperament on the long journey home, becoming a lighted lamp to his brothers.

David H. Lukenbill, President

The Lampstand Foundation

It takes a reformed criminal to reform criminals.

Post Office Box 254794

Sacramento, CA 95865-4794

Website: https://davidhlukenbill.wordpress.com/      

Email: Dlukenbill@msn.com

Blog: https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

With Peter, to Christ, through Mary

Better to light up than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate. (St. Thomas Aquinas)